Events

Calendar of Events

Dr. Cristina Igoa will be attending the fifty-seventh session of the United Nations meetings in New York and participating in the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). Representatives from Member States, UN entities, and NGOs in consultative status with the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) from all regions of the world will attend the session. The session will include a high-level round table, interactive dialogues and panels, and parallel events.

Dr. Igoa has been invited to present her 15 year longitudinal study on immigrant children and how they were helped to succeed in their educational endeavors. Also speaking will be Marta Santos Pais, UN Special Representative of the Secretary General on Violence Against Children (see further information below).

The 2013 session will focus on the following key areas:

Priority Theme: Elimination and prevention of all forms of violence against women and girls

Review Theme: The equal sharing of responsibilities between women and men, including caregiving in the context of HIV/AIDS (agreed conclusions from the fifty-third session)

Emerging Issue: To be determined

The Sisters of Notre Dame de Namurinvite you to a special event, “The Little Banana”: Moving the immigrant child from the violence of cultural uprooting to the empowerment of creative expression.

Immigrant children entering school systems in host countries encounter culture shock as they struggle to assimilate new languages, customs, and systems of learning. In most cases, the accompanying isolation, loneliness, and exhaustion do violence to children’s personalities and their education. Dr. Cristina Igoa, teacher, author, international speaker and an immigrant herself, has entered the inner world of these children, successfully engaging students, parents, colleagues, and the California Department of Education in bringing about change in this scenario. Come hear young women, teachers and administrators share stories about how with Cristina’s creative methodology students conquer the frustration of being strangers in a new land, succeed in school, and learn to live in the richness of two cultures.

Dr. Cristina Igoa will be attending the fifty-sixth session of the United Nations meetings in New York and participating in the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) from February 27th – March 3rd, 2012. Representatives from Member States, UN entities, and NGOs in consultative status with the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) from all regions of the world will attend the session. The two-week session will include a high-level round table, interactive dialogues and panels, and parallel events.

Dr. Igoa has been invited to present her work with immigrant children and the findings of a 15 year longitudinal study of these children– now young adults and living productive lives. The study will be published in the form of an Epilogue for her book, The Inner World of the Immigrant Child. She will be speaking in a panel with women who are working in 3rd World countries and who have done extraordinary work towards the empowerment of rural women.

The 2012 session will focus on the following key areas:

Priority Theme: The empowerment of rural women and their role in poverty and hunger eradication, development and current challenges

Review Theme: Financing for gender equality and the empowerment of women

A global policy-making body, the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) is a functional commission of the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), dedicated exclusively to the promotion of gender equality and the advancement of women. Every year, representatives of Member States gather at the United Nations Headquarters in New York to evaluate progress on gender equality, identify challenges, set global standards and formulate concrete policies to promote gender equality and advancement of women worldwide.

Christina Igoa, Ed.D. will join other educators in reading their contributions to the book “Dear Nel: Letters to Nel Noddings (ed. Robert Lake; In Press, Teachers College Press) in a workshop entitled “Letters to Nel Noddings: A Dialogical Inquiry Into a Philosopher’s Life, Scholarship and Teaching.” After the presentations, Dr. Noddings will deliver his responses to these tributes.

In Dr. Igoa’s paper, “Opening the Door to the Inner World of the Immigrant Child,” she will discuss how Nodding’s work beautifully supports Igoa’s belief that rigid school policies can create disempowering environments. Igoa advocates the need to humanize our classrooms to facilitate the development of second-language literacy, the most self-empowering skill an immigrant child can gain in school. Starting with care and trust opens the door to a successful experience for the immigrant child in the classroom.

Past Events

Presenting a paper entitled “Epilogue: The Inner World of the Immigrant Child,” Cristina Igoa, Ed.D. will discuss the findings of the 15 year longitudinal study of children whose early years in U.S. schools were explored in her book, The Inner World of the Immigrant Child (1995), and now reprinted by Routledge of Taylor and Francis Group. Dr. Igoa will describe the methodology she developed to help the children move forward through school and on to higher education. She will explain how school systems must adapt a multicultural populations of today, with primary focus on California, where some districts are overwhelmed with more than 100 languages and cultures, and discuss how educators can help these children acquire the skills they need to succeed within the global reality.